The Man Booker Prize has announced its longlist, featuring two-time winner JM Coetzee going for a third bite of the cherry, a surprising crime thriller, an offbeat romance and several debuts.
The Booker's Dozen, contains 13 authors – six women, seven men - each vying for the £50,000 prize. The award is open to authors of any nationality writing in English and whose works are published in the UK.
Britain tops the selection with six nominations, while the US received five nods and one Canadian and one South African author have also been listed.
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The list is less diverse than in 2015, when it featured authors from Ireland, Nigeria, India and Jamaica, home to Marlon James, the country's first Booker winner.
"The range of books is broad and the quality extremely high," said judge Amanda Foreman.
While some of the titles challenged expectations of what a novel is and can be, the writing was "uniformly fresh, energetic and important", she added.
Coetzee is the acknowledged veteran of this year's list, having taken the title in 1983 and 1999, as well as being a Nobel Prize laureate. The Schooldays of Jesus is the South African's first novel since The Childhood of Jesus in 2013.
It is due to be published in the UK in September and little has been said about it yet, other than the mysterious description on the Penguin website, which says it is an allegory about a young boy named David who is enrolled at the Academy of Dance, wears golden slippers and learns to "call down the numbers from the sky" while also learning some troubling truths about adults.
Fellow nominee Deborah Levy was shortlisted in 2012 for Swimming Home. Her book this year, Hot Milk, which examines a difficult mother-daughter relationship, is a "beguiling tale of myths and identity", says Michelle Roberts in The Independent, drawing on "a rich tradition of feminist writers, poets and psychoanalysts who have interpreted the murderous look of the Medusa as men's fear of women's erotic and creative power".
Perhaps the most surprising book on the list is Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project, says Justine Jordan in The Guardian. The crime thriller, which was published last year by the small independent imprint Contraband, was not widely reviewed, but was described by one critic as “a real box of tricks… a truly ingenious thriller as confusingly multilayered as an Escher staircase”.
Also on the longlist is American Paul Beatty’s acclaimed satirical novel, The Sellout, about a black man who reinstates slavery in his hometown, while, British author AL Kennedy's Serious Sweet, an off-beat romance involving troubled pen pals, is tipped as a possible winner.
Other inclusions are debut novelists Wyl Menmuir’s The Many, Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen and David Means’ Hystopia, along with Pulitzer-winner Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton, Virginia Reeves’s Work Like Any Other, David Szalay’s All That Man Is, Canadian Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing, and Ian Mcguire’s The North Water.
William Hill have listed Kennedy and Coetzee joint 3/1 favourites for the prize. The shortlist will be announced on September 13.
Buy some of the longlist nominees from The Week bookshop.
